Stan Collymore has laid into the Chelsea ownership for their treatment of Mauricio Pochettino in his column for Caughtoffside, calling it the “poorest of decisions.”
“My understanding is – from a couple of people I know at Chelsea – that Pochettino basically wanted more control over things but the Chelsea hierarchy were like ‘the structure is the structure. This is the way that we want to do it,” Collymore explained.
“Chelsea had a coach that’s really good with youngsters and who was starting to develop a style of play to be honed and refined… It’s another incredibly poor decision from Todd Boehly,” he concluded.
A confusion that continues
It’s very difficult to know exactly what’s caused the breakdown, given we’re only getting briefs clearly from the club’s point of view.
What you can say is that it’s not Todd Boehly’s decision. In fact, it seems like he was one of Pochettino’s supporters in the discussions about the manager’s future.
Boehly headed up the initial bid to buy Chelsea and certainly ran things in the first 6 months. Since then it’s been a very even split with Behdad Eghbali, and in fact it was the latter party who seemed to lead the drive to oust Pochettino.
If anything Boehly was the pro-Pochettino candidate of the two. But simply by virtue of being the figurehead of the bidding process and that first summer, the American has now become the figurehead for the ownership, and tends to be the one whose name is used as a shorthand for the whole group in situations like this.
It’s not particularly fair on Boehly, but equally he should have kept his head below the parapet if he didn’t want to risk this happening. Jose Feliciano certainly isn’t getting as much flak, and he owns as much as any of them.